In Bryan Magee’s book Confessions of a Philosopher there is a helpful account of the rise and fall of Logical Positivism, explaining how the positivists and after them the logical empiricists managed to think that Popper was playing their game of “meaning”. “So the knee-jerk reaction to the name ‘Popper’ became ‘falsifiability’.” That is one of the reasons why I am not entirely happy for Popper’s epistemology to be called “falsificationism”.
Go to this link for the full story, covering Magee’s experience at Oxford, Yale and then as a reporter and commentator, politician and public intellectual par exellence when returned to philosophy in a more serious way.
